Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar to keynote URI writing conference

Kate Bramson Journal Staff Writer journalkate

Tuesday

Jun 11, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Mary Cappello was a new young teacher who had recently won the University of Rochester’s teacher-of-the-year award in 1989 when she met Ayad Akhtar, who this spring won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama...

Mary Cappello was a new young teacher who had recently won the University of Rochester’s teacher-of-the-year award in 1989 when she met Ayad Akhtar, who this spring won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and who will travel to Rhode Island this month to talk about his craft and the perseverance it takes to succeed as a writer.

Cappello remembers Akhtar as a “singular intellect and creative soul, even at age 19.”

“He had an intensity about him, and charisma, at the same time that he was a deeply contemplative — even monkish — person intent on reading and learning as much as he could,” she said.

Last fall in New York, after she saw his play “Disgraced,” she recalls saying: “This play is a masterpiece. I think we just witnessed a Pulitzer.”

Now an English professor at the University of Rhode Island, Cappello thought to ask Akhtar to be a keynote speaker at URI’s seventh “Ocean State Summer Writing Conference.” He accepted, the second speaker in recent years who has agreed to keynote in the months before winning the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.

Cappello played a key role in shaping him as a writer, Akhtar said in a telephone interview with The Providence Journal.

In high school, he wanted to become a writer, after a teacher changed his life by inspiring the 15-year-old, introducing him to literature and helping him conclude that the greatest thing one could do in life would be to write.

Then at college, he pored over works by T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats and others in Cappello’s class. She encouraged him to read the works closely, for word choice and meaning. She honed his perspective on the process of writing, the craft and the history of the craft, he recalls.

“She was somebody who really taught me how to read — and how to read as a writer, how to look at writing from the perspective of someone who was writing,” Akhtar said.

Akhtar, who transferred to Brown University and earned a theater degree in Providence, is the son of Pakistani immigrants, both doctors who raised him in Milwaukee.

Twenty-three years after he took her class, Cappello watched Akhtar’s work on stage, where she said he deftly addressed “the macro-violences of our world inside the micro-living rooms of his characters.” In the play, a successful corporate lawyer is painfully forced to consider why he has hidden his Pakistani Muslim heritage for so long.

“The affective range of the play is staggering,” Cappello said. “The tautly paced dialogue moves the audience from laughter to tears — at some points we were laughing uproariously, and by the end of the play we were weeping. The writing is riveting and rich from the start of the play to the finish.”

Hearing those words during his interview with The Journal, Akhtar said he was “amazed” by the reaction from Cappello, whom he describes as a serious writer, committed to a life of writing.

Cappello wrote to him last fall, with praise for the work, he said, “and I wrote back: ‘There’s nothing more gratifying than receiving this e-mail from you, who in so many ways was the early mentor of the entire process of writing.’ ”

At the URI conference, Akhtar, who is 42 and lives in New York, expects to speak of his progression as a writer. The best advice he offers aspiring writers, he said, is that this work takes perseverance — “not just blind perseverance,” but “clear-eyed perseverance.”

That’s a true understanding, he says, of one’s limitations and the realization you can grow as a writer from encounters you have with others.

“You keep showing your work to those you respect and trying to get better,” he said.

About a decade ago, Akhtar says the realization struck him that authenticity starts within oneself.

“When the work is coming from a personal place, it’s just stronger,” he said. “There’s very little distinction to me between the person you are and the work that you do.”

That doesn’t mean a writer is limited to writing only about personal experiences, but that knowledge also helps one process experiences differently, he says. By way of example, he talks of a novelist friend who is intrigued by his ability to create characters who are flawed but who she also comes to love.

“That’s not craft,” he tells her. “That’s how I see people. I see them flawed but also have a lot of love for them. … How we feel love is because we see people’s vulnerabilities.”

That blending of personal experience into his work clearly resonates.

“Ayad addresses his audience as intelligent citizens of the world,” Cappello says, “and he gives us in his art the political nature of our lives in all their richly braided and vexed complexity.”

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